17 December 2006

You rock dude ! I wanted to write a long post about him. About what is being said about the man, the LeWeb3 conference. I started 2 posts, and I stopped.

I think the defence is best left to the man himself, and he has just done so here.

In a nutshell I however wanted to say this:

I've known Loic in a professional context since 1998: he has never changed; entrepreneurial, enthusiastic, charismatic, incredibly energetic. He does more with his time and will than most of us. I respect fully his recent statement that he personnally supports the right-wing candidate Nicolas Sarkozy for the French presidential election. I myself have called to vote for the left-wing candidate Ségolène Royal. For full disclosure according to the blogosphere etiquette (although I don't feel I need to), my company vpod.tv was one of the sponsors of LeWeb3

no other Internet conference in Europe this year has brought in such great quality of networking, of participants, of blue-chip sponsors, of press attention, of global attention. Loic has almost single-handedly brought the spirit of Silicon Valley to Paris for 2 days. For those who can not afford to fly to San Francisco this was a unique opportunity, thanks to Loic.

I was GLAD that the level of discussion went up at this conference. The Internet is not about blogs only; it includes virtuals worlds (WoW, 2nd life), tools (VoIP, Wikis), many stakeholders (sociologists, education professionals...); hence leWeb3 was a great name. That someone brought a Nobel Peace prize to talk to us is utterly outstanding. That he indeed managed to bring in 2 front-runners to the presidential election in France next year is amazing: that Loic got them to talk about their vision of the Internet; and at least for one of the 2 candidates, you can say that that one hasn't got a clue as he could have talked about bananas or education in the same words (at least LeWeb3 was the occasion to show it to all). Thanks again to Loic, all stakeholders were united in the same place. I also noticed that noone left the conference room during the politician's sessions, although there were plenty of other opportunities to do so (networking rooms, startup corner, sponsor booths...)

I can't imagine that the top 1 search on technorati is LeWeb3. Can't people focus all of this negative energy into a positive one, and talk for instance about the campaign against poverty such as www.one.org or Blogging for a Better world, an initiative that was born at this conference (a participant offered to donate $100,000 + Shimon Peres offered to be on the board) ? Bloggers have wanted for a long time to become actors of a new world, instead of just being witnesses. Now is the time to start acting and not just booing. If some among us stand up and take on this endeavour, then we should support them, as it is a very difficult task, and not bash them.

almost all VCs I know attended the conference, which is a BIG win and move from last year, as they are an essential ingredient of the Internet ecosystem. They are not visionnaries we all know that, that's why we have entrepreneurs. But entrepreneurs most often than not, need capital to realize their vision and dreams. LeWeb3 was a great place to foster these encounters

finally, interestingly, most business models adressed at LeWeb3 (hence of the current entrepreneurial generation) are ad-based. I did not see any large brand, ad agency, ad specialist at the conference. Missing in action? Next time, we need them to face the entrepreneurs, and double-check that our industry is going the right way.

After-thoughts:

I don't think Loic can go back to being the EMEA guy for SixApart and keep on promoting blogs. He's been influenced too much by his entrepreneurial life (he's create about 4 companies with a 3-year cycle), about the Davos conferences he's been attending in the past 5 years, about his regular appearances on radio and TV in France, about his quest for a more entrepreneurial and active society. Don't get me wrong, he's done a phenomenal job at promoting this technology and his company. He really deserves a lot of credit for the work achieved. But I believe he's grown out of his job.

He's recently been twice managing Internet feedback at 2 rallies for the Sarkozy presidential race. You know I don't like this politican and I don't support him. But Loic does. And this is a fantastic opportunity for him, maybe once in a lifetime opportunity to give a hand to the guy you support. So if I were Loic, I'd go full time for Sarkozy (I need to find help on the Socialist front to fight him them :p). And after the campaign is over this summer, find himself a job were he can have a strong impact on European society and entrepreneurship. The guy is 34. He's got at least 30 years of public life to give us. Choose well Loic. Do something that you really want to do, that is meaningful. You were not chosen to be a Global Leader of Tomorrow at Davos for nothing.

As you once said, power comes with obligations and duties. And you also said "ideas don't matter, only excution does". We definitively need more folks like you in Europe! Help us foster this new generation.

As you know, I'm here at the ETRE'06 conference, and there's a lot of buzz going around about this deal. I got a couple of journalist calls, so here are some quick notes on my immediate thoughts (in bullets for lack of more time):

ever since Youtube came into the front scene last DECEMBER (3m Video Views/day, 100m/day now), at every single conference I go to, Youtube gets mentionned. This is clearly irrational exhuberance. There are many larger deals happening in LBOs or M&A that get less attention because they tend to happen in another spectrum than the VERY HOT INTERNET CONSUMER space. Hence building up the heat on a company (and the Allen & Co conference a few months ago really ignited the chase for a buyer) usually leads up to this kind of valuation. I grabbed a couple of reactions of VCs today on this deal, and Mark from Mangrove said that indeed it was smaller than his Skype deal... But remember all the hype about Skype before it got acquired ? This is clearly a sign of a bidding war, and we read here and there, than News Corp, Yahoo and Microsoft (among the others Viacoms of this world) fought this fight.

this deal CLEARLY validates the online video segment as a huge compartment of the Internet and of media in general. No one would pay any $1.6b if there was not much more money to be made in this market. Hence look for a much higher return on this deal for Google in the years to come. Indeed, they share price went up more than $8/share, ie almost $2b in market cap I read, so a cool $400m profit in share price (I didn't bother to check, so double fact check me on this). I remember trying to persuade European investors last year that there was indeed a market for online video for many many months. So much time wasted with folks with little vision. Recent deals such as this one, millions of cash injected later in Veoh, Revver, Videoegg, or the imminent launch of the Venice project, etc. show that being too early to a market doesn't help, and that probably if you don't live near visionnary VCs it's hard. Netvibes pulled it off in our continent, but then, Tariq got help from *THE* visionnary guys over here, Index Ventures and sheer talent.

the added value of this deal is not only all about cost reduction and scability (more on this later), but on the ADVERTISING market. Clearly, a google/youtube deal shows that the internet video advertising market will explode from now on and I'm delighted to be on the right track about it. More on this at the upcoming Monaco Media Forum, where I shall be on a couple of panels. eMarketer, Jupiter and the likes will have to update their projections shortly to a much larger number than the projected $1.6b in 3 years.

Additional random notes:

it's an all stock deal. Great, exchanging paper with paper is cheap for Google, locks in the founders of Youtube and has potential upside. I wish we had these kind of liquidity tools for our startups over here. Still it's stock, not cash.

Sequoia selling to Sequoia. Where we see VCs here syndicating among 3 of 4 of them for just a couple of millions euros, here is a gutsy VC investing in a small company and fostering it to exit. Last year at ETRE, I remember saying that of course, if Sequoia got in this unknown video company, then it was going to be big. Their track record shows it. The trick here is that Sequoia sells to Sequoia backed companies (Google), creating a conveyor-belt ecosytem. They used to do that with Cisco in the old days, when any new network company would be swallowed by Cisco... We talked about this with Fred Destin this morning... Now we also never talk about their losses either.

it seems that AUDIENCE is the new name of the game, a strategy that Dailymotion is following in France. Who cares now that the audience was built on 22 second clips (really, who cares? as there is no standard to measure video views), on porn, on massive copyright infringment... what matters is the big numbers. AUDIENCE. I believe this is NOT the way to build a SUSTAINABLE business, but hey? if you're going after a quick flip, build an audience, monetize it, sell it, and deal with lawyers later, then maybe it's the right approach for entrepreneurs ? Copyright holders seem to want to have access to a massive new audience. Deals with CBS were announced this morning as well, following other deals with Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, etc. Expect all of them to sign up now, and go compete against other well established platforms such as iTunes.

What's in it for them ?

For YouTube founders, clearly an exit for a random business model. But in addition, access to great Google engineers to deal with scalability issues (bandwidth, storage, distributed hosting) at a much lower cost (economies of scale and scope); access to fantastic advertising expertise (the GoogleAds guys), combined efforts with the branded content sourcing teams; global reach;

for Google: another weapon in their global dominance vs. the YHOO, MSFT, NEWS... of this world. A way to compete vs. MySpace; vs. the upcoming VeniceProject from Niklas/eBay; even more buying power for infrastructure from their suppliers; a 46% market share of online video (in addition to their own 10%)

for Sequoia: it seems a 43x multiple in under 2 years (the New York times is reporting their stake was about $495m).

My bet is that the online video space is just starting to happen. There's a lot of room for different market approaches, products, geographies, etc. Indeed look at how many TV companies there are out there.

But, the number of market consolidators is shrinking. As the number of global media players. Stay tuned.

And, nevertheless, huge kudos to Chad and his co-founders for building a huge brandname, for having disrupted the online video space, and on a fantastic exit in such as short time-frame. Up there in the hall of fame of internet entrepreneurs.

28 September 2006

While sitting in my hotel room in Amsterdam doing emails, I put on an english speaking channel in the background: turns out to be BBC2's Dragon Den. It's actually the elevator pitch concept we've done a couple of times on this blog: aspiring entrepreneurs go in front of a jury of millionaires and pitch their business.Although the idea is great, the execution of this show in the episode I'm watching is not great: there is more focus on the drama, the candidates and jury feelings than on the business itself; for instance we don't get the full pitch (maybe it's just because it's a best-of ?)

Anyways, the key takeaway is that this show really helps foster entrepreneurial spirit and shows pieple that actually try to start a a business, and that it's not easy. A more educational side maybe would be to hear the real pitch and the real questions.

10 September 2006

Jean-Michel Billaut, host of the now almost legendary French show "the BillautShow" came by our offices on Friday. That turned into a long conversation in front of the webcam of my macbook pro (25 min...) where we discussed about the online video industry, competition, venture capital, P2P, reaction from TV networks, B2B, und so weiter...

He posted the original show here, and there is some discussion going on there as well.

28 August 2006

Sarenza, the French & European Zappos, has raised a series B of 4m euros with existing investor Galileo and SGAM, announced tonight They’ve also launched a new version of their site a couple of days ago. We’ve talked about them a couple of times already…

22 August 2006

I had a great chat with Aymeril in his offices in Silicon Valley last week. He tells us what the French Trade Office does there, how he helps French corporations reach out into the valley, and a few other tricks.
Enjoy !

15 August 2006

Rewind… 100 million francs for netvibes… waow. And that’s a less than a year-old French company.

My only comment is that this kind of money could not really have been raised in Europe, even less in France, except with a handful of VCs. Indeed, Index Ventures was a seed investor and is back in this round, and US fund Accel now has European offices.

Other European funds need to start thinking globally when they invest; I’ve met a *lot* of European VCs in the past year for vpod.tv. And I can see the difference between a globally minded player, and a local player. Between a risk-prone co-entrepreneur (I like that way of describing your investor), and a fund manager employee… And that’s not even touching upon some ethical concerns I’ve heard / seen on the market.

I’m almost saying that from now on, European entrepreneurs should change their financing strategy: grab angel money from well connected and experienced entrepreneurs (such as Loic Le Meur, Martin Varsavsky, Pierre Chappaz…), and get your financing from anglo-saxon funds!

Congrats to Tariq and to Pierre! And to the less publicly known Marc !